John le Carre Quotes

• Thank heaven, though, one of the few mistakes I haven’t made is to talk about the unwritten book.

  John le Carre

• Remember Graham Green’s dictum that childhood is the bank balance of the writer? I think that all writers feel alienated. Most of us go back to an alienated childhood in some way or another. I know that I do.

  John le Carre

• People who’ve had very unhappy childhoods are pretty good at inventing themselves. If nobody invents you for yourself, nothing is left but to invent yourself for others.

  John le Carre

• Most people like to read about intrigue and spies. I hope to provide a metaphor for the average reader’s daily life. Most of us live in a slightly conspiratorial relationship with our employer and perhaps with our marriage.

  John le Carre

• Love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you love.

  John le Carre

• In the last 15 or 20 years, I’ve watched the British press simply go to hell. There seems to be no limit, no depths to which the tabloids won’t sink. I don’t know who these people are but they’re little pigs.

  John le Carre

• In every war zone that I’ve been in, there has been a reality and then there has been the public perception of why the war was being fought. In every crisis, the issues have been far more complex than the public has been allowed to know.

  John le Carre

• If there is one eternal truth of politics, it is that there are always a dozen good reasons for doing nothing.

  John le Carre

• If I had to put a name to it, I would wish that all my books were entertainments. I think the first thing you’ve got to do is grab the reader by the ear, and make him sit down and listen. Make him laugh, make him feel. We all want to be entertained at a very high level.

  John le Carre

• I’ve always had difficulties with female characters.

  John le Carre

• I’m really a library man, or second-hand book man.

  John le Carre

• I think that where I’ve watched a movie go wrong, it’s usually because the dread committee has been interfering with it.

  John le Carre

• I think I’m in the same mood as ever, but in some ways more mature. I guess you could say that, at 65, when you’ve seen the world shape up as I have, there are only two things you can do: laugh or kill yourself.

  John le Carre

• I made a series of wrong decisions about moderately recent books, and I’ve sold the rights to studios for ridiculous amounts of money and the films have never been made. That’s the saddest thing of all, because they’re locked up and no one else can make them.

  John le Carre

• I happen to write by hand. I don’t even type.

  John le Carre

• I don’t think that there are very many good writers who don’t live without a sense of tension. If they haven’t got one immediately available to them, then they usually manage to manufacture it in their private lives.

  John le Carre

• I don’t think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity.

  John le Carre

• I don’t know whether it’s age or maturity, but I certainly find myself committed more and more to the looser forms of Western democracy at any price.

  John le Carre

• I am still making order out of chaos by reinvention.

  John le Carre

• History keeps her secrets longer than most of us. But she has one secret that I will reveal to you tonight in the greatest confidence. Sometimes there are no winners at all. And sometimes nobody needs to lose.

  John le Carre

John le Carre (51)

Birth:	19th October, 1931
Nationality:	British
Profession:	Novelist

About

David John Moore Cornwell is best known by the pen name John le Carré. He was born in Poole, Dorset, England. He is a British author of espionage novels and former intelligence officer. He studied German Literature at the University of Bern in Switzerland. He earned a BA degree from Lincoln College, Oxford University in 1956. He then taught French and German at Eton College for two years. During the 1950s and '60s, he worked for both the Security Service and the Secret Intelligence Service. He has written several novels include: Call for the Dead, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (Won- Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel), The Little Drummer Girl, A Perfect Spy, The Naïve and Sentimental Lover, The Night Manager, The Tailor of Panama, Absolute Friends, A Most Wanted Man, and A Delicate Truth.

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Today's Anniversary - 23rd January

Births

• 1953 - Robin Wayne Zander
• 1915 - Potter Stewart
• 1944 - Rutger Hauer
• 1974 - Tiffani Thiessen
• 1950 - Richard Dean Anderson

Deaths

• 1981 - Samuel Barber
• 1993 - Thomas A. Dorsey
• 1995 - Ken Hill
• 2003 - Nell Carter
• 1997 - Richard Berry